The Intentional Family

Jacques-Alain Miller, a French academic, said, "For it is a simple matter to love one's neighbor when he is distant, but it is a different matter in proximity." This is an iconic dilemma of the modern man; that we value proximity without closeness.  Between our virtual social networks, news bubbles, internet shopping routines and private modes of transportation most of us living in the modern world have gone to great lengths to re-route our social wiring, making our mindset less collective and more self-focused.

Despite trends leaning toward social seclusion, there are still people out there who seek out their neighbors with the intention of arranging a lifestyle that will be greatly influenced by them. These groups of people are sometimes as close or even closer than one's blood family and are called intentional communities. To many, the term “intentional community” evokes an image of cults that incorporate pedophilia into their religious practices, small groups of people who sacrifice goats to intergalactic gods, or even Communism.

When I was five my family joined an intentional conservation community in the rural outskirts of Clarke County in Athens, Georgia called Kenney Ridge. Named for the family who maintained the132 acres as a cotton farm in the century following the Creek nation's removal, Kenney Ridge Community was started in 1993 by a small group of people who bought the land and then sold off two and five-acre segments to people who were interested in their community vision. Today 22 families live there, seven of which have girls my own age with whom I grew and bonded during my childhood.

“We were a group of young parents who wanted to raise our children in a supportive and healthy environment where we knew our neighbors, where there was a commitment to live lightly on the earth, have social interactions together, and share responsibilities,” said Nancy Stangle, a founding member of Kenney Ridge, who also came up with the idea of creating a land trust from common land in the community and reserving some lots for families in need of affordable housing. Today she is the executive director of a local nonprofit, Athens Land Trust, which maintains the principal it applied to Kenney Ridge in its beginnings: land is a community resource that needs to be used for the benefit of all residents. 

Kenney Ridge functions like a regular suburban neighborhood in a lot of ways; neighbors get upset with each other occasionally over who’s going to take responsibility for some new project or whose dog is chasing whose chickens around. Being on the outskirts of town, it has few houses and a lot of nature (houses must be setback from the road at least 100 feet and, unlike a lot of neighborhoods, there are 17 acres of wooded trails and common areas that we children spent the majority of our tv-less childhood transforming into mini-Camelots and Hogsmeads) and it has people who live private lives for the most part. It is, however, different from your average suburban neighborhood. “Because we share a love for this land and a desire to be neighbors, we have a bond that I think is closer than ordinary neighbors,” Stangle said.

            In the beginning, every lot owner automatically became a member of the Kenney Ridge Community Association (KRCA) and was a member of a committee or the Board of Directors. Also, bylaws and general rules had to have a consensus vote to be passed. Currently, a President, Vice-President, Secretary, and Treasurer are elected to the KRCA as well as members of the Board of Directors and Committee Chairs but votes now do not always require consensus. Monthly potlucks (held after meetings) and community weekend retreats – the best memories of my childhood – ceased for a few years when the old Kenney farmhouse was sold to an individual member; however, a new community center was built on some of the common land. To this day the community gathers there for weekly potlucks and other community events. 

            Having personally experienced the adage, "it takes a village to raise a child" during my formative years, I chose to spend my gap year between high school and college visiting intentional communities while traveling in New Zealand. I felt as though I had seen some deterioration of the community dynamic in my own community, especially after the kids grew up and moved away, and wanted to see if there was some magical formula out there for a 100% successful community. I visited five communities in total in my six months abroad and spent three months in two communities which left a very strong impression on me.

            I left the United States in September of 2008 and spent my first three months in New Zealand’s North Island, backpacking to various WWOOF sites (Willing Workers On Organic Farms - an international organization that matches travelers with locals who are willing to provide room and board in exchange for labor) and staying with family friends. A few days after the new year, I was on a ferry and then a bus headed to my next WWOOF site, Riverside Community. Riverside was known as New Zealand’s oldest intentional community.

            Riverside is a community based on humanitarian, pacifist, and socialist principles that was founded in 1941 by a group of Christian Pacifists. As the story goes, Hubert Holdaway and friends were sitting around a campfire one night talking about ways in which they could demonstrate that living cooperatively was a practical alternative to the competitive ways of normal society which they saw as a major contributor to war. “The feeling among people (was) that we wanted to break away from competitive capitalist society and create some alternative,” said Chris, Riverside’s oldest living member, who joined Riverside with his wife Jean in 1952. Several of the founding members vested a lot of hope in the creation of the Riverside community because they were conscientious objectors to the draft at a time when the Second World War was calling upon many New Zealanders to provide aid to Britain, the “Mother Country.”

            Today, Riverside has changed in a lot of ways. Now resting on 208 hectares (over 500 acres) of beautiful rolling hills, it has 20 adult members and 10 children who live there. You are no longer required to be a Christian Pacifist if you join, however, in exchange for the free rent, vehicles (which you must sign up to use as there are only a few), petrol, weekly allowances of about $50-100/week/family and a non-possessive philosophy, you must be willing to put all of your money into the community bank account and share everything you own, which extends ideologically to your home, kids (or at least, the raising of them), labor and skills. Everyone contributes to running the community, whether that be in the communal gardens or from your own home, taking care of the children of people who were working.

            Another couple I spoke with who weren't members but renters at Riverside, named Dawn and Emory Jones, were in their mid-eighties and had traveled all over North and South America and New Zealand looking for a community to suit their ideals and had even started their own before finally settling in Riverside. Their search for the “perfect community” was fueled by a desire to find other people who were willing to live as simply as they were. “We saw some communities which talked about living lightly, but then were still possessive about their TV or such,” said Dawn. They felt that Riverside was the closest they were going to come to in their lifetimes to this vision, even though the small three-room house they lived in “was a sacrifice”, according to Dawn, meaning that they would have preferred even less personal space. Emory, a former sociology professor at a small university in California, offered an additional reflection based on his lifelong experiences with intentional communities: “The history of community is failure.” That is the negative, he conceded, noting my shock. While most communities succeed in their own way by fulfilling some of their intentions, there is always at least one flaw, something that many are not happy with.

            One of the flaws, according to two younger former residents at Riverside who moved to another community five minutes away after they became disillusioned with the power structure, was that not everyone shared the work. Some people were free-loaders, according to the couple I stayed with, who moved to Atamai Eco-Village after several years living at Riverside. Riverside’s main income at this time, apart from a cafe and other rentable venues, was a dairy farm, run by a solitary elderly man. Another thing that caused Joni and Alma to become disillusioned with Riverside was how difficult it was to become a member. With a preference for young, skilled, and employed families, not everyone who wanted to be a member was selected by the community and only community members enjoyed privileges such as being able to attend meetings where decisions were made. This caused several people to view living there as a trade-off, including Dawn and Emory.

            Ademai Eco-Village seeks first and foremost to be a village, which their website describes as a settlement that offers more chances to interact with your neighbors on a social and even professional level than your average suburb or neighborhood. The residents also observe sustainable building practices. At the time I stayed with them, their ultimate goal was to completely sustain themselves off of their own land. Only two families lived there when I stayed there; however, they have access to almost 100 hectares of land (again, very beautiful and workable land) and had short-term plans to host 15 families and long-term plans to host 40 or more families, which would have made them the largest community I had visited, were I to return when they were at maximum capacity. There is also no plans for a leadership council at Ademai. The nascent Ademai Village Council owned 30 hectares of the property and leased the rest out to incoming members. They claimed to show no bias or discrimination towards prospective members and wanted no kind of hierarchy in the running of it. 

            In all of the communities I have seen and researched first-hand, Riverside has certainly stood the test of time and is now able to capitalize on that longevity and its various business projects. Ademai Eco-Village seemed like a hopeful sprig that had tempered its communal vision and was trying to go in with eyes wide open to the practicalities of sharing the responsibility of running a community. Only time will tell if they have struck a good balance of pragmatism and idealism. I certainly appreciated the closeness of Ademai and the level of involvement each member took responsibility for. My own community, Kenney Ridge, works on a different level entirely where members are not as involved in each others’ lives, yet I appreciate it for all the things it has provided me, primarily a close extended family and a deep interest in collective decision-making. 

            When Emory confessed that, despite historical evidence indicating a pattern of failure for humans to build sustainable communities he still believed it was worth it to seek out this lifestyle, I wondered why. At the time, I was too polite to do anything but nod my head, but I considered his view later in light of my trip to New Zealand. Almost three years later, while discussing Thomas Moore’s book Utopia in my college Utopia/Dystopia class, I learned that the term "utopia", coined by Moore himself, literally means no place. This pointed me towards the idea that maybe there is no place on a map where people should sacrifice their differences for a common vision – no matter how much it strives to align with a common good. Rather, utopia might be more useful to think about as an internal sense of peace that you bring with you wherever you live and build community.